Brummett, Naomi

NAOMI BRUMMETT
LIFE IN NEW HOPE
Well, I was born in Roan County, and our address what Wheat Tennessee, and Wheat was a very historical little place. A college center at one time. I lived there until I was ten years old, and my mother was widowed, and I was the baby child. So I moved where my mother moved, and we came to Robertsville in 1934, and this was a good move for us because you know that was before electricity. So it was a couple of years and then Norris Dam was finished and we had electricity. We attended New Hope Church which was the center and the school center of all the activity. We enjoyed country living. My mother did domestic chores for some of the people in the community that you’d probably would remember. The names are familiar, the Lockets, the John Erwins family, John Rice being their grandchild, and the J. Nash Copelands played a very important part in my life.
When I was 14 and a freshman in high school my mom and I moved in with Nash and Wanita Copeland, and of course they had a grocery store, and mom took care of their three sons, and we lived there until the Manhattan project moved in on us. So I graduated form Robertsville High School. The last graduating class was May of 1942, and pretty soon after that things began to really change in this area. In fact when we were having our last classes at school the bulldozers were moving in, the fences were coming down, and people were getting notices to vacate the area. In the mean time I was dating a young man, James J. Jr. as he’s known Brummett, and when I graduated from high school we saw each other quite frequently, and on December the 7th, 1941 we were out for a Sunday evening little ride, came in with the radio on listening to Gene Audrey, and there was breaking news on the radio that Pearl Harbor had been attacked and we are at war. I remember Franklin D. Roosevelt making that announcement. So things really changed then. Then in August of 1942 my husband went to war, and in October of 1943 I went to work in Y-12, and it wasn’t long after that until the little church was demolished, and of course by that time the people in the community had scattered all over, and we didn’t have addresses for our friends or anything at that time.
POST-WAR AND CHURCH LIFE
When my husband left for war he was training in Fort Eustis Virginia, and of course our mail then we had a three cent stamp, and that was kind of interesting. He had free mail so that’s how we corresponded, and he seemed to move about every two or three months. Then he was in Fort Benning, he was in Camp Stewart, and then one day I had a telegram from New York, and I though uh-oh, this is it. So he of course told me that he loved me and that all was well with him and that he was off to Europe. So in 1945 the war was over, and he returned to the states in October of ’45 came in on a train sometime in the night but didn’t know where his family was because they had been evacuated from Oak Ridge and had to move in with relatives in Clinton, and the only directions he had was by mail because we didn’t have telephones, and he knew it was west of Clinton. So he started walking west of Clinton, and his sisters worked at Magnet Mills and got up early. So he saw this farm house with the lights on and he thought this must be the place. So it was, and so he came in, and then we took up where we left off with courtship and everything, and in April on April 27, 1946 we had a candle light wedding at Black Oak Baptist Church.
In the meantime New Hope had played such an important thing, a place in our life. It really was New Hope to me because I loved the church, I loved singing in the choir from the time I was 12 year old, I loved revival meetings, dinner on the ground, I loved community baseball teams, and I loved my school Robertsville, I liked the choral group there, I liked the drama that we would have at times, we always had school plays, and it was just a good life. And we were so close in the community. It was sort of a story book thing that you don’t really experience anymore, but if there was a need in the family there was always somebody there to help in any illness, new birthing of babies, a death. I remember my mother helping at times if a lady died they’d asked her to come and bath and dress the corpse, and she was a saint anyway my mother. I can’t give enough credit to her. Her name was Addie McGill. She was Addie Reed McGill, and the Reed goes back to the Meltons who were Melton Dam people. You know the Melton Hill Dam. I’m descended from that family also, but back to New Hope. I’m sure that you’re interviewing a lot of people probably that attended that church, and I was saved in 1936 born again as Jimmy Carter would tell you. I know all about that, and I was baptized in a brook that ran through the Anderson Farm. They had to dam the brook up so they could baptize me, and my husband was baptized in what is now the pool over at Groves Center. At that time it was a spring and there was a little lake there. So that’s where he was baptized. So that certainly has been a great part of our continuing life because we still love church and serve in church.
ACTIVITIES AT NEW HOPE CHURCH
Well, you know, we came along that age where southern gospel music was born, and we had singings, the gospel music singings quite often in our church. Some of the families, the Ellis family that lived in Y-12 what it is now, Mr. Hibbs Ellis was our choir director and the John Piet family was very active and the daughter Sarah Piet was our pianist. I don’t know some of the other families that you would be interested in, the Walters, the Reeds. My Uncle Charlie Reed was very active in that church, very prominent.
BILLY HIGHTOWER
I would like to talk about this particular minister that was not a pastor but was part of his family that were members of our church, but his name was Billy Hightower, and Mr. Billy had had an accident early in life and both his hands were blown off, but he was a great person and had a lovely family. Many of his children, it was a large family, and his children made school teachers. I guess three or four of them were school teachers, and they were well respected. Another thing, you know, the people from the Loiston area had just been evacuated from up there, and a lot of the families were back. The Erwins and the Stooksburys were two of the families that were relocated there, and members of their families went to New Hope to church, and the Erwins of course started a little church in Groves Center that you have read about, the Chapel on the Hill in that area. Of course the Chapel on the Hill was built later, but they were the originators of the little Methodist Church there.
THE TRUCK TO CHURCH
Mr. Ed Wright drove a truck and picked us up and took us to church. See we never owned an automobile, not until I was married. We didn’t own an automobile. We managed to get there. We could walk when the weather was cooperating.
MORE ABOUT THE TRUCK TO CHURCH
Well I couldn’t describe it because it would have been 1940 model probably, ’41, and it had banisters, a bed with banisters, and sometimes there would be I would say 12, 15 maybe more than that
people standing. We couldn’t sit. We had to stand on the open truck, but it didn’t seem to be too cold to go to church ever, and we would manage to get there. I couldn’t remember them closing church because the weather was bad, but I’m sure that we did have snow storms and blizzards and that kind of thing.
THE REMOVAL
We got a form letter in the mail stating that the, well it wasn’t condemned, it was just taken over. The property was taken over and we were to leave. We were supposed to be out of this area by December 31st 1942, and the men who had crops in their fields didn’t have time to harvest the crops. Some of them didn’t get out in time, and they would bulldoze the fence down and the cattle would run free. It was a strange time, and of course a lot of people have ill feelings about that to this day because they didn’t pay very much for the property. My mother had 40 acres of land, and she got $900 for 40 acres of land, but she didn’t get that right away. They didn’t pay off when you left. It was months before that. So people just had to move in with relatives or anywhere they could find a place to live. I don’t bear a grudge about that because it’s been a blessing. It really has. It gave a lot of people employment, and it came under such dyer circumstances that at that time I don’t remember hearing anybody say that they didn’t like to work in Y-12 because we knew we were doing something that was worth while. We didn’t know that it was an atomic bomb, and if we had known we couldn’t speak about it because they had signs on the road at the entrance everywhere with, don’t talk. You don’t talk, and if you did talk you weren’t there the next day.
LIFE AFTER REMOVAL
Well it was really frustrating when we had to leave because we had no place to go. For instance, my mom and I lived with the Copelands as I stated before. Okay, the Copelands didn’t have a store anymore so they didn’t need a babysitter, and they were looking for a place to live, and my mom and I didn’t have any money to buy a place if we found one because you couldn’t buy anything for $900 which we had not collected as of yet, but I applied for an apartment, not an apartment, a dormitory room to move into Oak Ridge, and they informed me that I had housing too close, that I was not eligible to get a dormitory room. So we continued to live with my sister and her husband’s family for a while, and then they finally paid us the $900, and we were able to buy piece of ground that was 75 feet by 100 feet and build two rooms on because that’s all the material that you were allowed, enough material to build two rooms, and that’s where we were still living when the war was over. At first I rode what looks like now a cattle truck, a trailer. It was a big truck but with this trailer on the back that had a row of seats on either side, but it came from Knoxville out here and people had to stand in the aisle. They had rings up you could hang on with putting your hand up in a ring, and that went on for several, well actually I guess until the war was over they still transported like that, but then there began to be carpools. So I was fortunate enough to get into a carpool, six person carpool and that was much better. This working 3 shifts which we had to do. I was what was called a calutron girl operated process production until 1948, and at that time I worked with some engineers because they had downsized. People where being laid off right and left, but I was blessed to get to stay a little longer there and work with the engineers. And then later I worked in spec. lab as an annalist there for Roger Hibbs which is a very familiar name. Then they downsized again in ’49, and I left, got that pink slip until May, and in May I had started on my own in producing three sons. So I was pregnant with our first son, and I didn’t go back to Y-12.
GETTING A JOB AT Y-12
We interviewed. In fact, they had Knoxville offices where we had to go to interview for the job. I had worked for Magnet Mills for nine months. They were making hose for the waves and the whacks and whatever. Anyway, they would not give us a separation slip. So we had to wait from July to October, three months to get that pink slip before we could even interview for coming to Oak Ridge.
CHRISTMAS: 1943
The first Christmas we were waiting for Alpha 1 to be finished so we could go on the job, and we would meet in the change house and do our shift, and the first Christmas they were transporting into the plant on school bus. So the driver on the bus said he would take us on a tour any of us that wanted to go on that shift. So we rode this school bus and went up to Outer Dr. which was the only street that was ready that you could travel on the Christmas of ’43. Now Christmas of ’44 was different. They gave us a break. Those who could sing and wanted to sing could go through the plant and sing Christmas carols. Now that’s quit different today isn’t it, because that would have been a conflict between church and state, but we enjoyed doing that the second Christmas.
A lot of the people where resentful of them taking the property because they did not pay well at all, and some of them were bitter and carried a grudge and maybe even to this day, but it was very hurtful for older people because my husband’s father, I remember, he had just built a new house, and they had several acres of land. I think around 50, 60 acres of land with new out buildings and everything, and they only got 3,500 for that property. And he had two sons in Europe at that time, my husband and his younger brother Clyde, and Clyde was killed at age 21 on D day in Europe. So my father-in-law, who became my father-in-law, didn’t live very long after the war was over. I think he grieved. I think so many things hit him so hard at that time, but he was a wonderful man. That was one. Of course my mom and I didn’t have anything anyway. So it really didn’t hurt us that much I guess, and I don’t think we gained anything really by becoming bitter. You know it eats at you.
And I met so many wonderful people and made so many lasting friendships out there. Being a little naive country girl you know and all these Yankees and everybody else coming in and working with people who were educated most of them. Well, all the engineers had degrees, and a lot of the people that I worked with. I hadn’t been blessed with that opportunity to go to college. I always wanted to, but I just—and people are easy to love if you want to love them. It was an enriching time for me. One of the supervisors that I had that I really loved, he was older and very mature, his name was Bob Mills, and of course when they downsized and they all left and everything, he went too. Georgetown Kentucky and was president of the college there in Georgetown Kentucky, and as far as I know he and; his wife was Millie and as far as I know he’s still living, but they’re well up in age now. But that’s just one of the many people. Gordon Grooms was one of my supervisors. Connie Bowling, which Connie’s still living. There are very few of them. I think Connie’s in assisted living, but he was a wonderful person. And you know it was such a different world. I was not afraid of being molested or insulted or; people were just so different. They were so helpful, and I felt so safe you know being with those people even thought they were strangers.
AMONG FRIENDS AT Y-12
Well, you always felt that you were among friends. We had one common goal. We were a united people. We wanted to get the war over. So I didn’t have any problems with anybody. I saw a few people come and go, and it seems like they had just vanished, but later we’d find out that they had crossed the line somewhere, either their lifestyle or they had talked too much. One time I remember when my husband went to work out here he was working at K-25, and I was of course in Y-12, he’d drop me off at time for me to go to work. Then he’d go for his shift. Then I had to wait for him to pick me up coming from K-25. And I kept feeling like a shadow or something, and I though, I don’t know what’s going on, but somebody is following me. I was right. It was an FBI person that was checking me out to see why I came through the gate at odd hours, to find out why I was leaving late. Of course it didn’t matter coming in early but leaving late. They let me know. He didn’t because you didn’t know who you were working with. You might be sitting at a table having your supper or dinner or whatever and an FBI person would be sitting there eating at the table with you. That happened all the time. You never had any idea who the investigators were.

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NAOMI BRUMMETT
LIFE IN NEW HOPE
Well, I was born in Roan County, and our address what Wheat Tennessee, and Wheat was a very historical little place. A college center at one time. I lived there until I was ten years old, and my mother was widowed, and I was the baby child. So I moved where my mother moved, and we came to Robertsville in 1934, and this was a good move for us because you know that was before electricity. So it was a couple of years and then Norris Dam was finished and we had electricity. We attended New Hope Church which was the center and the school center of all the activity. We enjoyed country living. My mother did domestic chores for some of the people in the community that you’d probably would remember. The names are familiar, the Lockets, the John Erwins family, John Rice being their grandchild, and the J. Nash Copelands played a very important part in my life.
When I was 14 and a freshman in high school my mom and I moved in with Nash and Wanita Copeland, and of course they had a grocery store, and mom took care of their three sons, and we lived there until the Manhattan project moved in on us. So I graduated form Robertsville High School. The last graduating class was May of 1942, and pretty soon after that things began to really change in this area. In fact when we were having our last classes at school the bulldozers were moving in, the fences were coming down, and people were getting notices to vacate the area. In the mean time I was dating a young man, James J. Jr. as he’s known Brummett, and when I graduated from high school we saw each other quite frequently, and on December the 7th, 1941 we were out for a Sunday evening little ride, came in with the radio on listening to Gene Audrey, and there was breaking news on the radio that Pearl Harbor had been attacked and we are at war. I remember Franklin D. Roosevelt making that announcement. So things really changed then. Then in August of 1942 my husband went to war, and in October of 1943 I went to work in Y-12, and it wasn’t long after that until the little church was demolished, and of course by that time the people in the community had scattered all over, and we didn’t have addresses for our friends or anything at that time.
POST-WAR AND CHURCH LIFE
When my husband left for war he was training in Fort Eustis Virginia, and of course our mail then we had a three cent stamp, and that was kind of interesting. He had free mail so that’s how we corresponded, and he seemed to move about every two or three months. Then he was in Fort Benning, he was in Camp Stewart, and then one day I had a telegram from New York, and I though uh-oh, this is it. So he of course told me that he loved me and that all was well with him and that he was off to Europe. So in 1945 the war was over, and he returned to the states in October of ’45 came in on a train sometime in the night but didn’t know where his family was because they had been evacuated from Oak Ridge and had to move in with relatives in Clinton, and the only directions he had was by mail because we didn’t have telephones, and he knew it was west of Clinton. So he started walking west of Clinton, and his sisters worked at Magnet Mills and got up early. So he saw this farm house with the lights on and he thought this must be the place. So it was, and so he came in, and then we took up where we left off with courtship and everything, and in April on April 27, 1946 we had a candle light wedding at Black Oak Baptist Church.
In the meantime New Hope had played such an important thing, a place in our life. It really was New Hope to me because I loved the church, I loved singing in the choir from the time I was 12 year old, I loved revival meetings, dinner on the ground, I loved community baseball teams, and I loved my school Robertsville, I liked the choral group there, I liked the drama that we would have at times, we always had school plays, and it was just a good life. And we were so close in the community. It was sort of a story book thing that you don’t really experience anymore, but if there was a need in the family there was always somebody there to help in any illness, new birthing of babies, a death. I remember my mother helping at times if a lady died they’d asked her to come and bath and dress the corpse, and she was a saint anyway my mother. I can’t give enough credit to her. Her name was Addie McGill. She was Addie Reed McGill, and the Reed goes back to the Meltons who were Melton Dam people. You know the Melton Hill Dam. I’m descended from that family also, but back to New Hope. I’m sure that you’re interviewing a lot of people probably that attended that church, and I was saved in 1936 born again as Jimmy Carter would tell you. I know all about that, and I was baptized in a brook that ran through the Anderson Farm. They had to dam the brook up so they could baptize me, and my husband was baptized in what is now the pool over at Groves Center. At that time it was a spring and there was a little lake there. So that’s where he was baptized. So that certainly has been a great part of our continuing life because we still love church and serve in church.
ACTIVITIES AT NEW HOPE CHURCH
Well, you know, we came along that age where southern gospel music was born, and we had singings, the gospel music singings quite often in our church. Some of the families, the Ellis family that lived in Y-12 what it is now, Mr. Hibbs Ellis was our choir director and the John Piet family was very active and the daughter Sarah Piet was our pianist. I don’t know some of the other families that you would be interested in, the Walters, the Reeds. My Uncle Charlie Reed was very active in that church, very prominent.
BILLY HIGHTOWER
I would like to talk about this particular minister that was not a pastor but was part of his family that were members of our church, but his name was Billy Hightower, and Mr. Billy had had an accident early in life and both his hands were blown off, but he was a great person and had a lovely family. Many of his children, it was a large family, and his children made school teachers. I guess three or four of them were school teachers, and they were well respected. Another thing, you know, the people from the Loiston area had just been evacuated from up there, and a lot of the families were back. The Erwins and the Stooksburys were two of the families that were relocated there, and members of their families went to New Hope to church, and the Erwins of course started a little church in Groves Center that you have read about, the Chapel on the Hill in that area. Of course the Chapel on the Hill was built later, but they were the originators of the little Methodist Church there.
THE TRUCK TO CHURCH
Mr. Ed Wright drove a truck and picked us up and took us to church. See we never owned an automobile, not until I was married. We didn’t own an automobile. We managed to get there. We could walk when the weather was cooperating.
MORE ABOUT THE TRUCK TO CHURCH
Well I couldn’t describe it because it would have been 1940 model probably, ’41, and it had banisters, a bed with banisters, and sometimes there would be I would say 12, 15 maybe more than that
people standing. We couldn’t sit. We had to stand on the open truck, but it didn’t seem to be too cold to go to church ever, and we would manage to get there. I couldn’t remember them closing church because the weather was bad, but I’m sure that we did have snow storms and blizzards and that kind of thing.
THE REMOVAL
We got a form letter in the mail stating that the, well it wasn’t condemned, it was just taken over. The property was taken over and we were to leave. We were supposed to be out of this area by December 31st 1942, and the men who had crops in their fields didn’t have time to harvest the crops. Some of them didn’t get out in time, and they would bulldoze the fence down and the cattle would run free. It was a strange time, and of course a lot of people have ill feelings about that to this day because they didn’t pay very much for the property. My mother had 40 acres of land, and she got $900 for 40 acres of land, but she didn’t get that right away. They didn’t pay off when you left. It was months before that. So people just had to move in with relatives or anywhere they could find a place to live. I don’t bear a grudge about that because it’s been a blessing. It really has. It gave a lot of people employment, and it came under such dyer circumstances that at that time I don’t remember hearing anybody say that they didn’t like to work in Y-12 because we knew we were doing something that was worth while. We didn’t know that it was an atomic bomb, and if we had known we couldn’t speak about it because they had signs on the road at the entrance everywhere with, don’t talk. You don’t talk, and if you did talk you weren’t there the next day.
LIFE AFTER REMOVAL
Well it was really frustrating when we had to leave because we had no place to go. For instance, my mom and I lived with the Copelands as I stated before. Okay, the Copelands didn’t have a store anymore so they didn’t need a babysitter, and they were looking for a place to live, and my mom and I didn’t have any money to buy a place if we found one because you couldn’t buy anything for $900 which we had not collected as of yet, but I applied for an apartment, not an apartment, a dormitory room to move into Oak Ridge, and they informed me that I had housing too close, that I was not eligible to get a dormitory room. So we continued to live with my sister and her husband’s family for a while, and then they finally paid us the $900, and we were able to buy piece of ground that was 75 feet by 100 feet and build two rooms on because that’s all the material that you were allowed, enough material to build two rooms, and that’s where we were still living when the war was over. At first I rode what looks like now a cattle truck, a trailer. It was a big truck but with this trailer on the back that had a row of seats on either side, but it came from Knoxville out here and people had to stand in the aisle. They had rings up you could hang on with putting your hand up in a ring, and that went on for several, well actually I guess until the war was over they still transported like that, but then there began to be carpools. So I was fortunate enough to get into a carpool, six person carpool and that was much better. This working 3 shifts which we had to do. I was what was called a calutron girl operated process production until 1948, and at that time I worked with some engineers because they had downsized. People where being laid off right and left, but I was blessed to get to stay a little longer there and work with the engineers. And then later I worked in spec. lab as an annalist there for Roger Hibbs which is a very familiar name. Then they downsized again in ’49, and I left, got that pink slip until May, and in May I had started on my own in producing three sons. So I was pregnant with our first son, and I didn’t go back to Y-12.
GETTING A JOB AT Y-12
We interviewed. In fact, they had Knoxville offices where we had to go to interview for the job. I had worked for Magnet Mills for nine months. They were making hose for the waves and the whacks and whatever. Anyway, they would not give us a separation slip. So we had to wait from July to October, three months to get that pink slip before we could even interview for coming to Oak Ridge.
CHRISTMAS: 1943
The first Christmas we were waiting for Alpha 1 to be finished so we could go on the job, and we would meet in the change house and do our shift, and the first Christmas they were transporting into the plant on school bus. So the driver on the bus said he would take us on a tour any of us that wanted to go on that shift. So we rode this school bus and went up to Outer Dr. which was the only street that was ready that you could travel on the Christmas of ’43. Now Christmas of ’44 was different. They gave us a break. Those who could sing and wanted to sing could go through the plant and sing Christmas carols. Now that’s quit different today isn’t it, because that would have been a conflict between church and state, but we enjoyed doing that the second Christmas.
A lot of the people where resentful of them taking the property because they did not pay well at all, and some of them were bitter and carried a grudge and maybe even to this day, but it was very hurtful for older people because my husband’s father, I remember, he had just built a new house, and they had several acres of land. I think around 50, 60 acres of land with new out buildings and everything, and they only got 3,500 for that property. And he had two sons in Europe at that time, my husband and his younger brother Clyde, and Clyde was killed at age 21 on D day in Europe. So my father-in-law, who became my father-in-law, didn’t live very long after the war was over. I think he grieved. I think so many things hit him so hard at that time, but he was a wonderful man. That was one. Of course my mom and I didn’t have anything anyway. So it really didn’t hurt us that much I guess, and I don’t think we gained anything really by becoming bitter. You know it eats at you.
And I met so many wonderful people and made so many lasting friendships out there. Being a little naive country girl you know and all these Yankees and everybody else coming in and working with people who were educated most of them. Well, all the engineers had degrees, and a lot of the people that I worked with. I hadn’t been blessed with that opportunity to go to college. I always wanted to, but I just—and people are easy to love if you want to love them. It was an enriching time for me. One of the supervisors that I had that I really loved, he was older and very mature, his name was Bob Mills, and of course when they downsized and they all left and everything, he went too. Georgetown Kentucky and was president of the college there in Georgetown Kentucky, and as far as I know he and; his wife was Millie and as far as I know he’s still living, but they’re well up in age now. But that’s just one of the many people. Gordon Grooms was one of my supervisors. Connie Bowling, which Connie’s still living. There are very few of them. I think Connie’s in assisted living, but he was a wonderful person. And you know it was such a different world. I was not afraid of being molested or insulted or; people were just so different. They were so helpful, and I felt so safe you know being with those people even thought they were strangers.
AMONG FRIENDS AT Y-12
Well, you always felt that you were among friends. We had one common goal. We were a united people. We wanted to get the war over. So I didn’t have any problems with anybody. I saw a few people come and go, and it seems like they had just vanished, but later we’d find out that they had crossed the line somewhere, either their lifestyle or they had talked too much. One time I remember when my husband went to work out here he was working at K-25, and I was of course in Y-12, he’d drop me off at time for me to go to work. Then he’d go for his shift. Then I had to wait for him to pick me up coming from K-25. And I kept feeling like a shadow or something, and I though, I don’t know what’s going on, but somebody is following me. I was right. It was an FBI person that was checking me out to see why I came through the gate at odd hours, to find out why I was leaving late. Of course it didn’t matter coming in early but leaving late. They let me know. He didn’t because you didn’t know who you were working with. You might be sitting at a table having your supper or dinner or whatever and an FBI person would be sitting there eating at the table with you. That happened all the time. You never had any idea who the investigators were.